Mystic Ink Publishing Voices of the Masters Series - Dominick Dunne - Santa Barbara Writers Conference - 1989

Dominick John Dunne (October 29, 1925 – August 26, 2009) was an American writer, investigative journalist, and producer. He began his career in film and television as a producer of the pioneering gay film The Boys in the Band (1970) and as the producer of the award-winning drug film The Panic in Needle Park (1971). He turned to writing in the early 1970s, and after the 1982 murder of his daughter Dominique, came to focus on the ways in which wealth and high society interact with the judicial system. Dunne was a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and from the 1980s, appeared regularly on television discussing crime.

Dunne was born in 1925 in Hartford, Connecticut, the second of six children of Richard Edwin Dunne, a hospital chief of staff and heart surgeon, and Dorothy Frances (née Burns). His maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns (1857–1940), was a successful grocer who in 1919 co-founded the Park Street Trust Company, a neighborhood bank. Although his Irish Catholic family was affluent, Dunne recalled feeling like an outsider in the predominantly "WASPish" West Hartford suburb where he grew up.

As a boy, Dunne was known as Nicky. He attended the Kingswood School and the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, but was drafted into the Army during his senior year of high school. He served in World War II and received the Bronze Star for heroism during the Battle of Metz. After the war, Dunne attended Williams College from which he graduated in 1949.

Dunne was the older brother of writer John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003), a screenwriter and critic who married the writer Joan Didion. The brothers wrote a column for The Saturday Evening Post and collaborated on the film The Panic in Needle Park: John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion wrote the screenplay, and Dominick Dunne produced the film (which featured actor Al Pacino in his first leading role).